Monday, April 6, 2015

Perception reset

Last week, for April Fools' Day, somebody attempted to confetti-bomb my government boss using a payload consisting of the little circles of scrap paper produced by the three hole punch. It didn't really go off as planned, or so I assume, since no one would own up to having been behind it and therefore no one could be interrogated as to intent. But basically my government boss was in meetings most of the day and by the time she returned to pop into her office and quickly check her messages, there was just a big pile of tiny paper circles on the floor around the threshold. I don't know if the prankster had carefully piled them on top of the slightly opened door so that when someone swung it quickly in or out all the confetti would swirl off and fall down, or if s/he tried something else and gave up halfway through, or if there was some other set-up before it all wound up on the floor, but on the floor is where it ended up long before it had a chance to have any impact on my boss beyond her seeing it and wondering what had happened. All in all, pretty lame as these things go.

The thing is, the confetti? Still there on the floor, five days later. Which is surpassingly strange because I often think of the housekeeping crew around her as being annoyingly overzealous in the discharge of their duties. I feel like they are constantly cleaning the bathrooms or vacuuming the floors or emptying the garbages, which is fine and all since I appreciate a non-squalid workplace, but gets on my nerves because it all happens during business hours. If I need to use the restroom but it's closed for cleaning, I get bitter. If I'm trying to concentrate on something or even taking a phone call, and the vacuum is running nearby, I get bitter. And based on the intensity of my bitterness you (or I) would think that these inconveniences are occurring on the regular, like every single day. How can it be Monday afternoon and the evidence of a prank gone meh from last Wednesday morning still be littering the carpet? Don't they vacuum, like, every day, or at least every other day? Should Thursday or Friday at the latest have been the last we saw of the punched holes?

Apparently not. And it's no big deal, really zero skin off my nose. If I were my boss, with all that paper debris in my office doorway, I'd be a little peeved, I reckon. As it stands, though, I'm just wondering how hypersensitive to the intrusions of housekeeping I've been all this time.